


Periapsis

by Abalidoth



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: AU, F/F, Military Space Opera, Space Station
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-06-09
Packaged: 2018-01-19 23:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1487740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abalidoth/pseuds/Abalidoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lieutenant Shallan Davar finds her way back in the presence of Admiral Jasnah Kholin, her old mentor, under false pretenses. But neither of them is quite telling the truth, and their feelings for one another threaten to destroy the fragile orbit they've fallen into...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Extrasolar Capture

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains very minor spoilers for Words of Radiance and major ones for Way of Kings, but mostly down the line.  
> The plot doesn't match exactly with either book -- I took elements of Shallan's and Jasnah's character arcs and made something new out of them. So if you think you know what's going to happen, you might be right, and you might not.  
> Similarly, there are a lot of familiar faces from Stormlight Archive, but in new roles.
> 
> Many thanks to Kogiopsis for beta'ing.
> 
> Enjoy!

The shuttlecraft’s engines hummed, providing a pleasant backdrop to the low murmur of Alethi Astry officers talking amongst themselves. Shallan gritted her teeth and tried not to mar the quiet with a nervous scream. Instead, she attempted a smile and asked, “How long to approach?”

Her honor guard, a burly bosun named Warrant Officer Yalb, raised the shuttle’s window shutter. His bionic arm whirred as he leaned forward in his seat and peered out the window. “Looks like we’re docking now, Brightness.”

“Please, just Lieutenant Davar will be fine.”

Yalb grinned. “Sure thing. We should be onstation in just a few minutes, Lieutenant.”

Shallan drummed her fingers on her datapad before pulling up her inbox for the thirty thousandth time this trip. NO NEW MESSAGES, it blinked at her in capital letters. She idly swiped the words away, flicking her fingers across the datapad in a gesture that was more nervous than useful, and pulled up a message from one week ago.

On Royal Alethi Astry letterhead, the message simply read “Brightness Lieutenant Shallan Davar, to report under Brightness Vice Admiral Jasnah Kholin soonest.” There was a posting number underneath.

The letterhead was fake. The posting number was real, but fabricated, and had been issued by none of Shallan’s commanding officers. The only genuine things Shallan brought with her were her uniform, her rank, and the anxiety burning in her gut.

To allay some of that crawling panic, she threw herself into coding. Programming came second nature to her, and her prior mentorship had sharpened that natural inclination into a keen edge. Her current project was something she called Pattern: a data-crawling algorithm designed to rewrite its own code and optimize itself for an ever-widening variety of natural language tasks. She didn’t have time to really get into the guts of the thing, so she just fiddled with the onscreen avatar, meant to pop up when it had finished baking a tasty morsel of knowledge out of the raw data it took in.

The shuttle jostled against the mooring seal of the space station, and a flurry of activity brought the atmospheres of shuttle and station into an equilibrium. Shallan and Yalb were herded out the airlock of the shuttle into the berth’s customs and security station; he identified himself as her honor guard and got a pin to add to his rank insignia to show for it.

Shallan didn’t often take advantage of the privilege, afforded to her as a noble officer, of an honor guard. But on Kharbranth Station, a semi-independent and wholly alien adjunct of the Alethi Systems Alliance, she didn’t want to take her chances.

One privilege she used in full, however, was her fast track through customs. She and Yalb were only in the gray processing annex for a few minutes before they stepped into Kharbranth Station proper.

The habitable area of Kharbranth Station was a huge cylinder many kilometers in diameter, with a spindle running through the middle. Shallan recalled what she’d read of its origins: originally an asteroid mining operation, the metals had run dry a century ago, leaving a vast empty hollow in the middle of the asteroid. Its resurrection began shortly later, when the space was made more regular and the asteroid spun up to provide false gravity. The mining routes became trade routes; an industrial station became a city.

Curving upwards in both directions to meet far above her head, the roadway bent Shallan’s perception in unfamiliar ways.The furthest point she could see, on the opposite side of the station, was hazy and indistinct with the kilometers of atmosphere in between. Centrifugal false gravity was old technology; a rotating reference frame like this was nothing Shallan had ever had to adapt to.

The huge lights on the center spindle were dimming -- it was late by the local system clock. The buildings all along the ring were lit up in riotous shades of neon. That shifting illumination revealed a populace just as colorful. Milling around her were Kharbranth residents and tourists alike, although she spotted the occasional Kholin military uniform mixed in among the crowd. It seemed that there was nowhere she could look without seeing a garish outfit, a brightly painted food cart, or a flashing sign advertising Almighty knew what.

So full of riotous bustle -- it looked so unlike any of the stations, military or civilian, that Shallan had been to before. Even the busiest colonies in the Jah Keved cluster were more businesslike than this. She reeled, looking up and up and up until the point where the two arcs of the horizon met just behind the central spindle. She felt a little foolish until she realized Yalb was doing the same thing, right next to her. Looking at it now, she could understand why Kharbranth Station was so determined to stay sovereign instead of integrating fully into the Alliance.

Rather than attempting to figure out the native mass transport systems, Shallan chose to go to the Archives on foot -- less than an hour’s walk, but half an hour in she was regretting it.

“I need to stop and catch my breath,” she said. “Still used to shipboard grav. Why’d they have to spin this place so fast?”

Yalb nodded. “There’s a restaurant over there. Unless you’re so enamored of Astry food that --”

“Bosun, I am ordering you not to finish that sentence. And also to go in with me for something to eat.”

He chuckled. “Lead the way.”

***

Shallan took a bite of her second flatbread wrap like she was afraid it was going to eat _her_. “Mmph. How do they make the same hydroponic protein stuff taste so much better on a station than shipboard?”

“Don’t ask me.” Yalb was already working on his third.

“So, bosun… can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, Lieutenant.”

“What happened to your arm?”

He laughed -- a coarse but infectious guffaw that echoed loudly off the metallopolymer walls of the restaurant. “I was wondering when you’d ask. Usually I get people to buy me a beer before I tell them.”

“Should I remind you that you’re on duty?”

“Ah, no need, it was that kinda thing that got me in this mess in the first place. ‘Sides, I like you, Lieutenant.” He leaned back on his stool a little bit. “So I was on watch, docked at the Sebarial system’s L4 outpost. I’d had a few to drink with the fellas, and we were just stationed outside the airlock to our ship, watching the people in the station go by.

“So this really gorgeous guy, all dressed up stuffy-like, walks past us. A real proper Thaylen beefcake, eyebrows all done up fancy and everything. Now, y’see, the other two on watch had been comparing the ladies walking by, in that crazy Sebarial fashion, yeah? But they knew that wasn’t my hand of poker, so to speak, and they were two of the finest spacers I’ve ever had watching my back. So they started encouraging me to get his attention.”

“What did you do?” Shallan pulled out her pad again and flipped over to the drawing program she’d installed on it. Technically it wasn’t military regulation, but she had greater treasons to worry about. The stylus she drew with, at least, was standard issue.

“See, that old L4 station, it had funny gravity in places, and we’d been stationed there for a few months. So I knew the soft spots, yeah? I ran out there in the corridor like a fool, jumped up where the gravity was weak, and grabbed hold of a rafter. I dunno how I thought he’d even be impressed; like I said, I was pretty scuttled at the time.”

Shallan nodded and began sketching him as he told his story. He spoke with easy, earthy diction -- it was apparent he’d told this story many times before, although probably to rougher crowds than Shallan. She drew a picture of him mid-gesture, capturing the storyteller’s trance on his face, the way his eyebrows framed his jaw.

Shallan hadn’t asked for an honor guard because she was afraid she’d get mugged in an alley. She had too many exemplary marks on her Astry pistol range trials for that. She wanted to feel safe in a different sense -- having Yalb along in an unfamiliar country made it feel like she’d brought part of her home with her.

“Turns out the gravity there was more unstable than I thought,” Yalb continued. “As soon as I grabbed that rafter I hit a really rough patch and it tore me sideways through the ceiling framework. I’m not sure how I lost the arm. I blacked out pretty early, but they told me that it was too much to reattach.”

Shallan winced. “I’m kind of surprised they didn’t just court-martial you, let alone that they gave you a new arm.”

“Turns out that the Astry had been trying to get new grav put in that rinky-dink station for years. I didn’t get in trouble because they needed me as a poster boy -- the poor dutiful spacer harmed by the civilian station management’s incompetence.”

“Lucky.” She chuckled. “And you got a nice prosthetic out of the deal.”

Yalb grinned. “Well, this is the part of the story I like. Y’see, I’m one of those people that doesn’t do well with the cloning stuff, you know? And apparently limbs are really difficult anyway. So after a couple months of bed rest -- and I’m proud to say I only sneaked out of sickbay three or four times -- they get me fitted with this bad boy here,” he slaps his cyborg arm with a muffled clang, “and guess who they brought in for the physical therapy?”

“No way.”

Yalb nodded. “Turns out that when the hot guy walking by is a physical therapist, getting your arm torn off is a good way to get his attention.” He pointed to the ring finger of his robotic arm -- a band around the base of the finger had been gold plated. “When we got married I had to promise him I wouldn’t do it again, though.”

Shallan finished her sketch -- one of her prouder works, she thought. She could almost see Yalb’s excited storytelling, his readily given grin, moving on the static lines on the screen. That grin widened when she showed him the finished drawing. “Heeeeey would you look at that. I don’t usually expect creativity from the brass. No offense, Lieutenant.”

“None taken, bosun.”

“What’s the thing in the corner of the drawing?”

Shallan furrowed her brow. “What thing?” She glanced back at the page -- Pattern’s avatar, a swirling abstract design of symmetrical curves, skittered around the image of Yalb’s face.

“Oh. That’s just a little program I was working on. I… must have forgotten to turn off debug mode.”

Yalb just shrugged and went back to his food, but Shallan kept watching the dancing lines for a while, feeling vaguely uneasy.

***

Meal finished and station light close to full dark, they made the rest of the trek to the Archives. The grand grey edifice was actually cut straight into the nickel-iron of the asteroid’s structure, not made of modern materials like most of the other buildings before it. It had an ancient, weighty feel, like a library out of a fantasy novel. It made sense, too -- the Archives were one of the reasons Kharbranth still thrived after the mine dried up.

The interior was just as imposing -- a massive domed vestibule, sparkling with the unpainted metallic form of asteroidstuff on every wall, stretching up to a huge old-style electric chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling was so tall that the chandelier’s chain was bent spinward by Coriolis forces. Archways led to stacks of old paper resources as well as more modern data storage banks. One of the smaller archways had a Alethi Astry crest overhead; Shallan made her way there through the streams of busy researchers.

A librarian with a shaved head stopped her. His nametag said Kabsal in oddly florid handwriting. “Brightness. Is there something I can do for you?”

“I’m here on orders. I’m supposed to report to Brightness Admiral Kholin soonest.”

“It’s late, Brightness. She may not be in her offices.”

“I know Jasnah Kholin,” Shallan said, drawing herself up to full height. “She’s still at work.”

“Of course. Right this way.” He looks at Yalb apologetically. “I’m afraid this side of the Archives is officers only.”

Shallan turned to Yalb. “I’ll be safe here.”

“You could get ambushed by a book. I’ve heard that papercuts are terrible.”

“You’ll be the first one I call if that happens, bosun.”

Yalb tipped his cap and tucked his eyebrows back. “So long, Lieutenant. I’ll be onstation as long as you are.”

 _Which might be fifteen minutes from now, if these faked orders don’t scan._ “I appreciate it.”

The librarian led Shallan back into what looked like standard office space. It was such a shift from the gravity of the Archives vestibule that she took a moment to get her bearings. The only thing that told her this was even Alethi Astry territory at all was the occasional seal on the wall or a document, and the pips on the collars of those working.

They stopped in front of a door with a simple plaque reading “HRH Admiral Jasnah Kholin.” Kabsal nodded at the door, eyed Shallan cryptically, then walked away without another word.

Shallan swallowed. Her deception might fail at any time now, and if it did, her own nervousness would be to blame. Jasnah Kholin had gotten very adept at reading Shallan in the years they worked together back in Kholinar Prime -- and Shallan flattered herself that the reverse was true as well.

That is, until Jasnah had sent her away without so much as a goodbye, shattering a long-built bond of trust out of clear black sky.

“And I’ll never find out why if I don’t pull this off,” she muttered to herself, reaching out to knock on the door.

  
  



	2. Conjunction

Shallan didn’t have to wait long after knocking. Almost immediately, a clipped alto sounded from inside. “Come in.”

With a shaky hand, Shallan hit the _door open_ button. Jasnah Kholin looked exactly like she remembered -- brown-black hair pulled back in a ponytail, focused violet eyes, cheekbones you could cut yourself on. Her medal-encrusted admiral’s uniform did as poor a job concealing Jasnah’s figure as ever--

Shallan deliberately forced her thoughts in other directions. If all this went well, she’d have all the time in the world to get flustered by Jasnah.

Jasnah’s eyes snapped upwards. “Shal -- Lieutenant Davar.” She sat back, work forgotten in the moment. Shallan knew how much it took to pull Jasnah’s attention away from her research. A good sign. “What are you doing here?”

“New orders, ma’am.” Shallan flicked something on her datapad in the direction of Jasnah’s desk. “I’m to work with you on some archive research for the Office of Engineering.” Where she had been transferred by Jasnah, abruptly and with no farewell.

But she would get answers about that soon enough.

Jasnah looked down at the file on her desk. “I… wasn’t informed of this.”

“Neither was I, until they put me on a shuttle,” Shallan lied. She scanned Jasnah’s face for a hint of anything familiar -- fond memories, anger, anything. There was nothing. Jasnah just seemed hollow.

“Hm.” Jasnah ran the authorization process on her desktop pad. This was the riskiest part of Shallan’s ploy. She had spent an exorbitant amount of money -- or rather, money had been spent for her -- to acquire the authorization codes needed to forge the orders. There was no such thing as a foolproof hack, though.

The codes had to go through three layers of servers in order to get cleared, and those servers were back on Kholinar Prime. Faster than light communication was instant, but the message took time to relay from the satellites far out of the Alethi capital planet’s gravity well.

“So,” Jasnah said. “Have you been well?”

Shallan boggled. Admiral Jasnah Kholin didn’t do small talk. Either something was seriously wrong, or she’d flustered the older woman more than she’d expected. “I’ve… been busy,” she said neutrally.

“Engineering has been giving you interesting things to work on, I hope?”

“I… suppose so?”

“Good. It would be a shame for them to waste your skills.”

Shallan bit her tongue. This was weird. This was _wrong_. She was expecting a cold shoulder from Jasnah, or maybe an outright dismissal, or -- in her wildest dreams -- a straight answer. But uncomfortable chatter wasn’t something she’d prepared a script for.

Fortunately, the desktop pinged before either of them could say anything further. Jasnah nodded. “All right. All the resources of the Archives are open to you. My personal assistance, as well, if you feel you need it and I have time.” She paused, like she was looking for something. “It will be good to work with you again.”

_Is that why you jettisoned me without saying goodbye?_ But obsessing wouldn’t do her any more good, in the moment, than ogling. It was just a pattern, a well-worn wrinkle in Shallan’s mind, a question asked so often it became a crusade.

“Thank you, ma’am. Um…” This next part was a gamble, but it was important for the other half of her mission, the task that her benefactor expected her to complete. “I’m likely to have a lot of downtime on my investigation…”

“What exactly are you investigating?”

“We captured a Parshendi cruiser mostly intact. I’m acting as a point of contact for research on engineering matters as Intelligence deconstructs it.” The first part was true, at least. But the Bureau of Engineering was under the impression that Shallan was to be working from her family’s home while she tended to business there.

“I’d like access to anything you dig up pertaining to Parshendi social structures,” Jasnah said.

Shallan froze. On the one hand, this was the first opportunity she’d had to glimpse the nature of Jasnah’s research. But she couldn’t risk her going over Shallan’s head to the Bureau directly. “I’ll hand off anything like that. You’ll be the first to see it, I promise.”

“Good. Anything would be helpful.” So little was known about the alien species that the Astry currently battled out at the Shattered Belt. The species that had preached goodwill, then assassinated Jasnah’s father. Most of Intelligence was groping blindly in the dark, hoping to uncover anything about the Parshendi’s motives.

If Shallan knew anything about Jasnah, she was parsecs ahead of anyone else studying the subject.

“Admiral, if I may?”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“My own investigations are going to have a lot of downtime. If there’s anything I can do to be of help to you, I’ll frequently be available.”

“You’re not permanently in my chain of command, Lieutenant. Most of my research is beyond your clearance level.”

“Please. You know I’m a good researcher. I’d rather be doing something other than rattling around Kharbranth Station.” Shallan crossed her fingers behind her back. “And I know you’re working too hard for one woman, even as brilliant as you are.”

“Flattery? Really?”

Shallan sagged. “It was worth a try.”

The corner of Jasnah’s mouth twitched. “So it was. Well, you make a good argument nonetheless. I’ll look for some research within your clearance level.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll do my best not to disappoint.”

“Do you have a place to stay?”

“I was thinking of looking for--”

“Nonsense.” Jasnah flicked her fingers across her terminal again. “I’ve found accommodations for you at Astry Officer’s Berthing. It’s not luxury, and it’s halfway across the station, but it’s private and paid for.”

“That’s all I need, Admiral. Thank you. Can you also find a berth for my honor guard, Warrant Officer Yalb?”

“Done. Same complex, in the noncommissioned wing.” She looked up with an expression of mild amusement. “Honor guard, hm?”

“It’s a new area, ma’am.”

“No need to justify it, Lieutenant, I just thought it was somewhat unusual.”

Shallan straightened. “Anything else?”

“Not at the moment. You’re dismissed.”

Trying to hide her relief, Shallan stood and snapped off the  traditional Veden three finger salute -- which was acceptable, if strange, in the Alethi military given the amount of cross-transfer amongst the Alliance.

Yalb was waiting for her outside the Archives, leaning against a wall and chatting quietly with someone on his tablet. He smiled brightly when he saw her approach. “How’d it go, Brightness?”

“Lieutenant. And it went very well. You’ll be berthed in the same place as me, unless you’d rather go back to your original post…”

Yalb laughed. “I’ve been on boring merchant marine runs for a year and a half solid. If I’m going to be bored, I’d rather be stationside. I’m with you.”

As Jasnah had said, the Astry berths were on the other side of the station from the Archives, too far to walk, so they had to take the cable cars. There were eight cable car stations on the outer ring of the station, and two transfer stations on the inner spindle. The cables glinted in the reflected neon light -- from across the station they looked like gossamer, but up close she could see they were thicker than Yalb’s arm.

She’d heard that the cable cars were not popular with tourists and only barely tolerated by locals, but she didn’t understand why until  the car started ascending. The rotating reference frame of the station made for a nauseating shift in forces as they crossed over the spindle, where the rotation was slower, and back towards the rim. Shallan was not usually one to get spacesick, but she wasn’t looking forward to gravity cartwheeling around her on her twice-daily commute.

Still, they survived, and had no trouble finding the Astry berthing. It had the universal architectural cues of barracks everywhere: utterly dull and functional. They parted ways when Yalb headed off to find his own place in the noncom unit, and Shallan found her own room on the directory.

It was roomy compared to what she was used to shipside. Even unpacked, her luggage and belongings only took up a fraction of the room. She sat on the bed and frowned at the bare walls a moment before pulling out her pad again.

She saved the sketch of Yalb before cuing Pattern to initiate an unauthorized security protocol she had set up with her other employer. The avatar briefly skittered across the screen before bringing up a video conferencing program.

There was no connection right away, so while she was on hold she pulled out her stylus again. It had been a while since she’d tried to draw Jasnah; at first, her sense of betrayal had been too strong, and afterwards the memories faded along with the emotional scars. She tried to capture Jasnah as she had looked the moment Shallan walked into the office -- the instant that Jasnah recognized her onetime student.

She had no trouble sketching the background, the organized chaos of her desk, or the clean lines of her uniform. The lines flowed from her stylus as she laid down her sketch and filled in the lines. But when she got to the face, she stopped. What exactly had Jasnah been feeling when she saw Shallan? The woman was a mystery, and intentionally so -- but before Jasnah had cast her aside, Shallan had flattered herself into believing that she’d glimpsed the person beneath the rank and the family prestige. Since then, she couldn’t be so sure.

Was Jasnah pleased to see her? Dismayed? She was certainly surprised, but Shallan tried half a dozen expressions of dull shock, each one seeming more a betrayal of Jasnah’s intensity than the last.

The face was still blank when Pattern reappeared on the screen, a notification appearing in his wake. The other party had connected.

She flipped over, halfheartedly arranged her hair, and answered the call. A man appeared, still young but with age in his eyes, with a laser-sharp goatee the same color as Shallan’s own hair. His eyes glinted like his commodore’s stars as he stared Shallan down. “Report?”

“I’m in,” she said. “The forged orders worked. Jasnah has taken me in as a subordinate again, although I’m only temporarily in her chain of command so she’s being careful about confidentiality.”

“Excellent. When do you think you can gain access to her command codes?”

“It’ll take a while,” Shallan said peevishly. She had only agreed to this mission because it would allow her to seek answers from Jasnah -- she had no particular need for it one way or the other except as a source of resources for her own personal inquiries. She wasn’t going to cut short her time with Jasnah in the service of her other mission, any more than she had to.

“Just as long as you get it done.”

“I will.”

“Good. Keep me posted. And Shallan?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

“Yes, brother.”

The screen went black, with only the words Commodore Helaran Davar disconnected to keep her company in the darkness.


End file.
